//News & Announcements
//9.15.12
If you've missed the exhibitions of last season
you can see photos and read
reviews here.
//11.25.09
The Design Museum is now on Facebook.
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//7.1.09
Design Museum Centennial posters now for sale!
These can be purchased here through UC Reprographics.
//June 18 - August 31 Hours
Monday - Friday
12:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M.
Closed weekends and July 4
For more information, please click here
Enhancing the teaching and research activities of the Department of Design, the UC Davis Design Museum explores how design shapes, improves and makes economically viable the objects, technology and environments we use, inhabit and experience every day.
2012/13 SEASON
SPRING
Design Master of Fine Arts Graduation Exhibition
May 20, 2013 to June 6, 2013
UC Davis Design Museum, Cruess Hall
Opening Reception and MFA Presentations: May 23, Thursday, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
The UC Davis Department of Design offers graduate candidates in Master of Fine Arts the unique opportunity to collaborate with over one hundred departments at one of the nation's top public research universities.
Working with renowned design faculty, students explore the broader topic of "Design" through a specific design discipline, drawing on collaborations with the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences. They follow a rigorous process of critical research, produce a body of creative work, and assist with teaching in the undergraduate design curriculum. Students graduate to be future leaders entering the design profession, academia and other related fields.
This exhibition showcases the final research and creative projects documenting the theoretical framework and methodology by the candidates Christine Tao and Charlotte Semmes.
See photos here
Visual Research Archives: rethinking and redesigning the management of research materials
Christine Tao identifies design strategies to increase the organization, dimensionality, clarity, and accessibility of information stored in digital reference management applications. Her work demonstrates how visual and spatial attributes improve recognition, memory, and recall to more effectively manage and make sense of the vast and invaluable resources collected by researchers. This exhibition highlights Christine’s user-centered and collaborative interdisciplinary research and design process, from initial inspirations to concept and design development.
Christine Tao was awarded the dean's prize for best HArCS (Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies) presentation at the 2013 Interdisciplinary Graduate and Professional Symposium (IGPS).
Between Time and Beyond Words: Patterns of Consciousness
Charlotte Semmes demonstrates through creative explorations in pattern how mindfulness and ritual can enhance the design process. The intuitive play of line, color, and shape in each pattern is a sensory and emotive response to a moment in time. The body of work includes hand painted mandalas on silk, a unique collaborative community quilt project and digitally printed textiles encompassing 100 days of spontaneous hand drawn patterns.
Design-by-Design, Juried Student Design Competition
April 4 – 26, 2013
This annual installation, timed to coincide with UC Davis
Picnic Day, is a lively survey of undergraduate student talent
and creativity that reflects the multi-disciplinary breadth of the
Department of Design.
WINTER
Structures, Signifiers and Society: People and Textiles
January 22 – March 18, 2013
Opening Reception and Curator's Talk Thursday, January 24, 6–8 p.m.
Museum Walk with Curator Sunday, January 27, 2-4 p.m.
Free Admission
Featuring stunning examples from the UC Davis Design Collection, this exhibition of global ethnographic and contemporary textile design coincides with the book Textiles: The Art of Mankind by Mary Schoeser, published by Thames and Hudson in December 2012. Over 200 objects from the design collection are illustrated in the book, underscoring the significance and importance of the collection as a teaching and research resource. From identity to ingenuity, societies to environment, the viewer will see how textiles communicate through specific forms, structures and materials created and appreciated by people around the world.
Schoeser is a UC Davis alumna (Applied Behavioural Sciences: Design, 1972), a leading authority in the field of textiles, and Honorary President of the UK Textile Society. Now resident in England, she began her acquaintance with the UK as a participant in the University’s Education Abroad Program, at the University of Edinburgh. She has since returned to the Davis campus because the library, as she comments, ‘serves textile interests exceptionally well, covering as it does everything from raw materials, technology and polymer chemistry, to ethnography, anthropology and design. There is no library with open stacks that can equal it in Europe.’ She adds, ‘over a decade ago I began to visit the Design Collection as well, and was so impressed with the quality and diversity of its holdings that I wanted to showcase it in a publication.’
Schoeser will be available to sign copies of the book and giving a lecture at the opening event, sponsored by the Surface Design Association.
See photos here
FALL
Serigrafía
October 8 – December 7, 2012
Opening Reception
Thursday, October 18, 6–8 p.m.
This remarkable assemblage of silkscreen prints and posters
represents the best in visual communication and artistry from
California’s Latino/a printmaking community. Spanning the decades
conveys powerful Serigrafía from the 1970's to topics of concern today,
images and typographic messages ranging from political and economic
to social and cultural. Part of the exhibition will highlight the TANA
community art workshop, conceived and operated by the UC Davis
Department of Chicana/o Studies.
Produced by 
Lecture: La Lucha Sigue – The Chicano Silkscreen in the Struggle for Justice by guest speaker Carol Wells, Executive Director and Founder of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics
Time and Date: 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., November 1, 2012
Location: Art Annex
See photos here
Our Commitment
The UC Davis Design Museum is dedicated to furthering our understanding of the multifaceted and global aspects of design, and how design shapes and improves the objects, technology and environments we use, inhabit and experience every day.
It is a founding adopter of the Green Museum Accord (www.greenmuseums.info) and is committed to environmentally friendly operations, programming and business practices.
Media Contact: Adele Zhang, UC Davis Design Museum, 530.752.6150 / azhang@ucdavis.edu